SUNDRE — A young free roaming horse is extremely fortunate to have a second chance at life after being discovered stuck deep in a mud pit west of town.
“On a scale of one to 10, let’s hit about 12 on that one!” said Mountain View County resident Darrell Glover, one of the rescuers with a group from the Help Alberta Wildies Society, when asked how lucky the animal was.
“It was just an extremely chance encounter,” said Glover.
What had on Wednesday, May 6, originally begun as an off-highway vehicle photo excursion into Clearwater County's backcountry as part of an effort to document the herds, unexpectedly became an impromptu rescue operation, explained Glover. He was accompanied by Darla Connelly, from Strathmore, Nancy Giesbrecht, from Calgary, and partner Barb Robinson, also from Olds.
“We make two or three different trips out west to the foothills every week,” he said.
“I’m an old retired rancher, I don’t really have a job. So this is my job, is watching over these horses, to make sure that we have a pretty good idea what’s going on between the bands.”
His passion blossomed years ago in 2014 upon learning about a cull on free roaming horse populations, which he has since striven to protect.
“By keeping an eye on the populations and predator kills and things like that, it really helps us understand the dynamics of the herds out there,” he said, adding he debunked erroneous claims that free roaming horses have no natural predators.
“I’ve got lots of video of them being preyed on,” he sad.
In recent weeks, Glover said they had come across the carcasses of some 10 other free roaming horses that were not as lucky.
“It’s been a particularly hard winter on them. Some appeared to have died from starvation, some from predator kills,” he said, adding the group had, to a degree of success, been searching for new foals.
When the distressed roughly two-year-old mare, which was haplessly trapped in the muskeg’s otherwise undoubtedly deadly grasp, caught the group of four equine enthusiasts’ attention from a distance, they were compelled to act. But they initially weren’t certain whether the struggling animal was injured or perhaps giving birth, he said.
Parking and shutting off their ATVs nearby, the group realized as they cautiously approached that roughly three quarters of the mare was submerged in the thick mud, he said.
“At this time of the year, the horses love going in there because the grass is starting to become available as the snow leaves and they can still walk on the frost surfaces,” he said.
“But every year, there’s a certain number that we lose that fall through into the abyss, into these little sink holes that are generally undermined by flowing streams.”
Unaware of the danger hidden underneath the surface, the animals unwittingly walk along in water that’s barely a few inches deep, only to suddenly step into a hole that’s five or six feet deep, he said.
With nothing for the horse to push its hind legs against in a bid to get free, the animal ends up becoming exhausted in a futile effort to pull itself out with its front legs, he said.
As they approached, the mare showed a “very slight amount of fear,” he said.
“When I extended my hand and she touched it with her nose, it looked like she’d just gotten an electric shock,” he said, with a chuckle.
“But she quickly realized, I think, that we were there to help. She did not panic once. She was very tolerant and very patient with us.”
As they devised a plan to free the filly from the mud, their focus was to ensure the animal’s safety, as pulling her in the wrong way might have caused more harm, he said.
“We certainly didn’t want to put anything around her neck,” he said.
Fortunately well equipped with an array of gear on their ATVs, including a winch and straps, they got to the muddy job at hand.
“There was just no way the four of us could pull her out physically. It had to come out by winch,” he said, adding the task, which involved wrapping straps around the animal’s hindquarters, took about an hour.
“We didn’t damage her in any way bringing her out. All in all, it was a very successful operation,” he said.
Their only doubt was the condition of the mare’s hind legs, which they could not see and feared might be in a crouched position, complicating the effort to safely wrap the straps around from behind. Fortunately, upon feeling their way through the mud, he said they discovered the legs went straight down.
“And that’s exactly what we wanted,” he said.
“We were just slow, methodical, patient. And we were lucky enough to have the right equipment to pull her out.”
The horse must have depleted plenty of energy in its desperate struggle, which Glover figures lasted for hours, and he said her ravenous appetite instantly showed.
“She wanted to eat the grass that was coming in range of her. She had absolutely nipped everything within her reach while she was in the hole…all she did was eat.”
Hypothermic and numb as she emerged from the pit of mud, the mare struggled to stand upright at first but was within the span of about 15 minutes “moving like a wild horse again,” he said.
Despite the harrowing ordeal, Glover expressed confidence that she would bounce back, and planned to fly out not only to try and check up on the mare, but also to look for other animals that might be in a similar predicament.
“It’s a pretty common thing at this time of year,” he said.
“Even right behind where she was — just four, feet behind her — was a bunch of bones from previous horses that have met the same fate in that same hole.”
There are about 1,000 horses from Sundre to Ya Ha Tinda and from the Red Deer River to the Clearwater River, he said, adding the Sundre equine zone is home to the largest concentration of free roaming horses in Alberta.
While this was the first time Glover experienced finding a live animal trapped in the mud, he has on numerous previous occasions discovered bones in bogs at other sites indicating plenty of others met an untimely end. Without their intervention, he doubts she would have survived.
“Had we not taken that trail that afternoon — there’s absolutely nobody else out there — she would have most definitely been dead by morning. She was pretty exhausted and pretty hypothermic,” he said.
“She may not have even made the night, let alone the morning. So she was pretty lucky,” he said, adding that’s why they decided to name her Faith.
“She lives to see another day, and maybe have some babies.”
